Highway 95
by Ayoshen
Summary: We have to stop this; arguing won't accomplish anything. A Regina/Emma twoshot based on the sneak peek for 1x05.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:** I95 is an actual highway connecting Massechussetts and Maine. According to Google maps, anyway. Still not a native English speaker and this fic has lots of conditionals, so, you see. OTL

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><p><strong>Highway 95<strong>

There are times when I wish I had never come here. My life had never been a summer Sunday walk through the park with an ice cream cone, but I learned how to appreciate the occasional lollipop in the rain instead. I had my own way of doing things, a way I had devoted all my life to improving and adapting to. Everything else had to coexist with my rules.

Now I'm a tramp and I have to coexist with hers, and she screams at me.

_"Please, lecture me until his oxygen runs out!"_

It would have been so much easier. I had an unstable income, but still an income, and I had a place where I _knew_ I would be alone every night – believe it or not, the knowledge had its advantages. Most importantly, I didn't have to deal with Henry or children in general. Children are the embodiment of trouble. Take the kid, for example. He attracts problems from all over the country like a three ton magnet and it all spirals back to his mother. Now I have to deal with her pain, too. What have I gotten myself into?

What is _wrong_ with me? I shouldn't be thinking like this. I'm becoming like her.

Except that's not true, either. What am I doing? I can tell from the glaze in her eyes that she's scared. Hell, so am I. Terrified. I run a hand through my hair. This isn't getting us anywhere.

"We have to stop this. Arguing won't accomplish anything."

It all traces back to her; Henry never would have gone there if she had accepted his point of view. He never would have brought me here if she had allowed him to have some damn Sacher cake with chocolate topping and ten candles for his birthday. Mary never would have given him the book if she had chosen to spend Friday nights with him instead of council meetings.

Henry would never have searched for me if I had taken the god damn pill and spared him of all this nonsense.

I'm a terrible person. Maybe if I leave while I still can, it will make things okay. When he gets out, she will tell him I had to leave back to Boston for the rest of the money I'd earned because I'm going to need it as long as I keep wandering aimlessly around the town. She will tell him I'm coming back, but I never will because I will have mysteriously disappeared after a car crash on I95 and I'll be halfway to San Diego. Maybe it will make them happier.

"No, it won't," she agrees and looks me straight in the eye and in that moment, I forget what I was talking about. In any case, she's right. This is no time to point my finger at people. I should pull myself together.

I've always wondered if brown-eyed people had a darker layer to their personality than others. Out of the few I've met, they were all an impish sort. It's not like I believe some kind of physical trait or a constellation of stars during certain months of the year can directly shape our fate and make it decodable by a set of static rules we've written down over the course of centuries, but something about her eyes draws me in and it feels like foothold trap and a snare around my neck and I'm not sure whether to let it or back away.

In any case, this is her world. I have no right to raise my voice at her. More importantly, seeing the raw desperation, I don't want to. I want to never have to do that again. I don't want the picture of the two of us arguing to be the first thing Henry will remember seeing after he's been rescued and safe in her—in my—when he gets out of there. "What do you want me to do?" Anything, tell me anything. I'll do anything you want, because right now, I can't do anything I want. I can only avoid it for as long as humanly possible because I know what you want contradicts my wishes. It's my saving grace.

_"Help me."_

Sure. Sure, I can do that.


	2. Chapter 2

_"I am trying to save him! You know why he went in in the first place, don't you? Because _you _made him feel like he had something to prove!"_

I cannot believe this woman! Henry is in there, he might be injured, he might be unconscious, he might be lying on the cold ground with rats swarming around him and he might feel like he is closer to one of those preposterously overrated and badly drawn cartoon characters they call the 'X-Men', while the only thing he's getting closer to is a supposedly sagacious, all-encompassing old man in a cloudy castle; and the only thing she's capable of is to blame me. "And why does he think he has anything to prove? Who's encouraging him?"

"Do not put this on me."

I should have expected as much from a… who even is this woman, this Emma Swan? The bitterness speaks to me and all of a sudden it feels like we've met before. Somehow, somewhere, there's a connection, even if it's brief and frail like a cobweb in the very mine Henry is trapped in. Our entire existence is a never-ending series of threads, new knots forming where new connections are made and old ones loosened, executed by the guillotine of time. An idea crosses my mind that maybe he really is in there with the aforementioned web.

I have to cut it, shred it to pieces. I've always favored the power of reason over determinism.

"_Please, lecture me until his oxygen runs out!"_

I'm not running, but I am close to the point of no return. It's far beyond my reach. My only hope of ever even getting to see it is as far away from me as the web itself, and there's no guarantee it will ever return. My only hope of rekindling lost hope are Mary Margaret's birdhouses, which I detest for their weak heart-wrenching pathos and complete lack of purposefulness. Paradoxical, isn't it?

I rub my forehead in exasperation. I'm starting to get a raging headache because of her and the two voices I can't ignore, an ear-piercing cry and a swan song, both screaming for my attention at once, even though somewhere deep down, I know the two of them are the same. Her stubbornness, her compassion, her pretty little necklace and Henry—ugh. It hurts.

She approaches me and when she speaks, she seems as calm and collected as she was when Henry hopped past me and upstairs to his bedroom and I turned to her for the first time. "We have to stop this. Arguing won't accomplish anything."

Or when she almost cut down my tree. Or when we met in the hospital. Or when I stood in the garden at night, terrified for the first time in years because I didn't have all the answers. Yet I can't bring myself to not respond and hate this person, because as long as Henry is trapped, truth is on her side. "No, it won't," I reply and look into her eyes.

"What do you want me to do?"

What I see doesn't surprise me. The quality seems to be always present in her gaze, no matter the circumstances: determination with a spice of hope to soften it enough for her to go from the thieving Jean Valjean to Oliver Twist. It's the same look I get from Henry every time someone as much as utters the names of Hansel and Gretel. She reminds me of him too much. He reminds me of her too much. It all makes for a hundred responses forming in my head, some more reasonable than others. A part of me wants her gone. A part of me wants her right where she is, right in front of me. A little part of me wants her to take a step forward.

I haven't had to do math this simple for many years, and thus, by definition, I fail. I've spent too much time deriving and counting square roots to remember I should multiply before adding 108 to the equation. "Help me," I answer, because that is the most fitting reply I can give her, summarizing all those that came before it into one.

And Emma nods.

She takes a quick look around to make sure everyone is tending to their own business and puts her hand on my lower back, gently pushing me forward and away from the whole scene in a silent request. I take the hint; she wants to talk in private.

Then we stop and the tiniest, microscopic portion of me wants to feel the cold steel of the ring on her neck in my palm in contrast to the heartbeat underneath. That part has been numb since the Dark Ages; that part needs to reassure itself it can still feel warmth and then suffocate it with ice. It refuses to accept the logic and basic physics of the fact that if I hold the ring, it will absorb what warmth is left in me.

Then again, that means there's some left, doesn't it?

"...best we can. The tunnels might be connected to—"

And if a part of me wants something, however small, however foolish – it will take it.

I didn't even realize she was talking to me and now the ring is in my grasp in all its simplicity, and the beat with it, slow and steady and not too pronounced; the one thing about her that will never be able to change.

There is warmth in me after all. I can feel it trickling down my cheeks, but I don't understand why, why now, why here, after all these years of winter. It's just two small dots, but it's all I've felt in a lifetime.

And suddenly I don't need to reach out so far because her arms are wrapped around me and I stand frozen, still clutching the ring in my fist. So cold it burns.

"It's gonna be fine," she says and the whisper is loud enough to make angels cry. Not that I'm implying there's as much as a speck of ethereal nature in me. I can't possibly drown the voice because I'm gripping her jacket with my head buried in the crook of her neck, and it feels warm.

She tenderly kisses my forehead. "It's gonna be fine."

Now that the tiniest part of me has got what it wanted, the rest doesn't seem all that important at all.


End file.
